Modeling the Uncertainty with Maximum Discrepant Students for Semi-supervised 2D Pose Estimation

Semi-supervised pose estimation is a practically challenging task for computer vision. Although numerous excellent semi-supervised classification methods have emerged, these methods typically use confidence to evaluate the quality of pseudo-labels, which is difficult to achieve in pose estimation tasks. For example, in pose estimation, confidence represents only the possibility that a position of the heatmap is a keypoint, not the quality of that prediction. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient framework to estimate the quality of pseudo-labels in semi-supervised pose estimation tasks from the perspective of modeling the uncertainty of the pseudo-labels. Concretely, under the dual mean-teacher framework, we construct the two maximum discrepant students (MDSs) to effectively push two teachers to generate different decision boundaries for the same sample. Moreover, we create multiple uncertainties to assess the quality of the pseudo-labels. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves the performance of semi-supervised pose estimation on three datasets.